Mr. Canavos works on a variety of regulatory, compliance, and strategy projects for a wide-range of clients in the financial services sector, including broker-dealers, fintechs, and digital asset firms.​

Prior to joining Patomak, Mr. Canavos served as a Law Clerk to the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, FinTech, and Artificial Intelligence. In that capacity, he worked on a variety of legislative initiatives, including drafting the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act and managing oversight matters related to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121 and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s treatment depository institutions that serviced digital asset firms. ​

Prior to that, he served as a legal intern at both the DeFi Education Fund and the Blockchain Association. In these roles, he conducted legal research on a variety of issues, including the SEC’s denial of Grayscale Investment’s spot bitcoin ETF application and the procedural and constitutional concerns associated with the SEC’s regulation by enforcement approach to the cryptocurrency industry. Moreover, Mr. Canavos submitted response to several requests for public comment on the benefits and risks associated with DeFi from regulatory authorities, including the Department of the Treasury and Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority.​

Mr. Canavos also served as a legal intern at Jefferies Financial Group, where he conducted legal research on Rule 10b-5 and, specifically, whether unpublished equity research can be considered material, non-public information in the context of an insider trading claim. He managed a wide range of compliance oversight activities in this role, such as running pre-clearance conflicts checks on M&A transactions and managing the firm’s employee investment disclosure systems.​

Mr. Canavos earned his B.A. in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and his J.D. from the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, where he studied banking and financial markets regulation. As a law student, he served as a research assistant to Professor Paolo Saguato, the Executive Director of the Program on Financial Markets. He conducted research on stablecoin arrangements and whether broader adoption of these instruments as payments alternatives would warrant designating them as “systemically important financial market infrastructure” under Title VIII of Dodd-Frank Act.